This Particle Accelerator Makes a Substance That Has Not Existed in 13 Billion Years
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Loading... - william harrison
- 24 Feb 2023
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By using one of the most complicated and powerful machines on the planet, scientists have found a way to glimpse back to the very beginning of time itself.
By using one of the most complicated and powerful machines on the planet, scientists have found a way to glimpse back to the very beginning of time itself. This time machine is a particle accelerator, and it gives us a peek at the soup of our newborn universe. Just moments after the Big Bang, our universe was a very different place.
It started out so small, dense and hot that the building blocks of our reality atoms couldn't even form. Yet the ingredients of atoms, protons and neutrons were broken down into their most fundamental building blocks. Quarks. These quarks floated around in a perfect fluid, along with the particles that carry the force that holds them together inside of their proton and neutron homes.
Those particles are called gluons. Scientists name this universe creating fluid quark-gluon plasma. It hasn't been found in nature since the beginning of time as we know it. But scientist states can recreate it inside particle accelerators. It was officially observed first at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, where researchers used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or RHIC for short to smash atoms together.
RHIC's 2.4-mile-long ring speeds atomic nuclei around its massive circle 80,000 times a second at 99.995% the speed of light. They are steered in this ring by massive superconducting magnets and cooled down to near absolute zero at several points along the path, the two opposing beams of nuclei intersect and collide. The crashes give rise to explosions of particles, as well as to tiny droplets of quark-gluon plasma. Read More…
